Anyone ever offer to write a guest post for you? I imagine you were either daunted by what to do or very excited that someone else provided content for you. Either way, I bet your first response wasn’t strategic. 
After creating a keyword theme map for a client this week, I was asked by the client what she was supposed to do with guest posts. She wanted to know if she was to put them in their on silo on site or if she was to stop accepting them. The answer is neither. Armed with a keyword theme map you won’t have to wonder about accepting guests posts.
Instead you can start offering and accepting positions for “blog post substitutes”.
Remember back to elementary school when a substitute teacher would show up and she’d start handing out worksheets, or assigning that you read the next chapter in your book? They did that because the teacher left instructions. Having a substitute teacher come in and teach whatever they wanted to teach might help the teacher temporarily but wouldn’t advance the students or the class.
Understanding the keywords you’re writing about, the topics you’re covering and the timing you’re trying to achieve, you’ll know what guest post fit into your site’s structure AND you’ll know what topics to assign when someone just asks if they can write a post for you.
Once you have a plan for your site and know the topics you are going to be covering over the course of the year, you’ll be able to print calendars like the YMCA does telling people what’s coming next. You’ll be able to pre-sell what’s coming. But most importantly for this discussion you’ll be able to advertise for guest post topics. You could even create a page that says:
- “Would you like to have a guest post printed on this site? We’re currently accepting posts about:
- How to do Keyword A
- 3 best ways to do Keyword B
- Keyword C: What you’ve always wasted to know.
If you’re interested, we’re publishing these guest posts in May and June”.
When you accept guest posts that fit your site, help your SEO, and align with your customers’ goals, you free up time to accomplish other goals. When you accept them just to accept them, you don’t advance your goals, you don’t add kindling to the fire and you cease building your empire that day.
Strategy.
Even your guest post policy needs to be part of your overall strategy.